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OF WAR AND PEACE
May 25, 2008
Judges 19:1 – 21:25
There was a time when Israel had no king, and they lived as twelve independent tribes. There was a man who was a Levite, from the tribe of Levi, the priests of Israel (Exodus 28:1-4). He lived in the country, in a tiny town in the northern part of the nation. He must have been a difficult man to get along with, instead of marrying a wife he took a concubine. She came from Bethlehem, in the southern part of the nation. Perhaps he had to go that far away to find someone who would have him. While a concubine was something like a wife, she was technically a slave with a status much lower than a wife. After a short while she left him, she ran away back to her father’s home.
He kept thinking, “She’ll be back!” But, four months later she was still gone. So, he took two donkeys and a servant boy, and made the trip to Bethlehem to fetch her home. When he arrived, the concubine’s father was a pleasant and gracious host, and spent three days wining and dining him. However, it may have been a ploy to keep his daughter home a little longer. On the fourth day the Levite arose, packed his donkeys and prepared to leave. The concubine’s father said, “Before you go have a meal, have a little wine, visit a bit – then you can be on your way.” By the time they finished eating and drinking it was too late in the day to start the trip back. So, the Levite stayed for a fourth night. On the fifth morning he arose, packed his donkeys, and prepared to leave. Again the father said, “Before you go have a meal, have a little wine, visit a bit – then you can be on your way.” Again the Levite stayed to eat, drink and visit. However, this time he refused to be persuaded to stay over. Even though it was too late to begin a journey he took his concubine, his servant boy, his donkeys, and began the long trip home.
They passed the city of Jerusalem while the Sun was still up. And, they could have spent the night there. But, in those days Jerusalem was not an Israelite city, it was populated with Jebusites, and he didn’t want to spend the night with ‘foreigners’. They continued on. Well after sunset they arrived in Gibeah, populated by the tribe of Benjamin. He went to the city square and had a seat on the ground, which was the tradition in those days (Job 31:32). The locals were supposed to see that you were a traveler, and invite you home for the night. That was the custom everywhere. Unfortunately, none of the Benjamites would extend him that simple courtesy. They ignored the Levite and his entourage.
Finally, an old man came along. He was not a Benjamite. He had moved to Gibeah many years ago from the same part of the country that the Levite lived in. He took pity on the Levite and his group, and invited them to his home. No sooner had they entered the house and locked the door than there was a commotion. Several drunken men had followed them home. They began beating on the door and demanding that the Levite come out of the house in order that they might have sex with him (Leviticus 18:22, 20:13). They were very graphic in describing just what they wanted to do.
The old man spoke to the crowd (Genesis 19:5-8). He told them, “Don’t commit this crime! Don’t hurt my guest! I cannot send the Levite out to you. I’ll tell you what. You can have my virgin daughter, and his concubine. How about that?” But, the crowd became even more hostile. “We want the Levite! Send him out!” At these words the Levite panicked. He grabbed his concubine by the arm, pushed her out of the door into the mob, and then locked the door behind her. And then, he went to bed. The drunken crowd grabbed the terrified girl and spent the rest of the night beating and raping her. Her cries and screams stopped just before sunrise.
The next morning the Levite popped out of bed, rested and refreshed, and prepared to travel on home. He opened the door to the house. There was the girl, silent and face down, her hands against the door, splinters under her fingernails where she had tried to claw her way back to safety. The Levite pushed her with his foot. “Get up, we’ve got to be going.” No movement. It is unclear whether she was dead, or just beaten unconscious. The Levite picked her up and threw her over one of the donkeys then traveled back to his home. Furious at the way he had been treated in Gibeah, he took a large knife and cut her body into twelve parts. He placed each part in a box, and mailed them to the twelve tribes of Israel. His message was simple, “Look what the Benjamites did to me! I want retribution!”
The leaders of the twelve tribes met in the town of Mizpah, near Gibeah. They came with four hundred thousand soldiers, and the Ark of the Covenant – the box where God lived (Exodus 25:22). They demanded an explanation from the Levite, “We have never seen anything so vile and offensive as your boxes. What is the meaning of this?” And so, he told them the story. Sort of. He may have changed some of the details. He said, “I and my concubine ended up in Gibeah for the night. Those evil men surrounded my house, they demanded sex from me, they meant to hurt me. I want justice! Oh, and they took my concubine from me and killed her.”
As you can imagine, all who heard the story were outraged. They demanded that the Benjamites surrender the men who had committed this heinous crime for prosecution in the courts. It’s funny how family will circle the wagons around one of their own, even when they know they’re wrong. The Benjamites refused to turn over the offenders. The tribal leaders were furious. They passed two resolutions that day: 1) We will go to war with Benjamin. We will turn our soldiers against one of our own. 2) We will never again allow any of our daughters to marry Benjamite men. We don’t want any family ties to them.
Benjamin was not a large tribe. They could only muster twenty six thousand soldiers. Not much against a force of four hundred thousand. However, they had one special weapon. It was not uncommon for men to become maimed in farming accidents, or in war. A man who lost his right arm was considered useless in a fight. He couldn’t carry a sword and a shield; he was going to die as soon as the fighting began. But, the Benjamites had retrained all of these left handed men to use sling shots (Judges 3:15). A Benjamite slinger could fire a stone at one hundred miles per hour, and was accurate up to one hundred yards. It was said not only could they hit you in the head at will, they could pick which hair on your head to focus on. The Benjamites locked themselves up in the city of Gibeah with twenty six thousand foot soldiers, and seven hundred slingers.
Attacking a fortified city is a suicide mission, especially when the city has seven hundred well armed and highly accurate slingers. The tribal alliance lost twenty two thousand soldiers that day, and Benjamin suffered no casualties. The next day didn’t go any better. On the second day the alliance lost eighteen thousand soldiers. That night they approached the Ark again. “God, are you sure you want us to attack? After all, they are our brothers.” God spoke through the prophet Phinehas and told them, “Tomorrow I will deliver them into your hand!”
That night the alliance prepared a special plan. They snuck ten thousand of their best soldiers near the city, and hid them in the weeds and bushes. The next morning the alliance attacked again. The battle had barely begun when the alliance began to retreat. “We’re no match for these guys! They are too good! Boy, it’s lucky they don’t leave the city and chase us, or they would kill us all and the war would be over.” The Benjamite soldiers may have been brave, but they weren’t very bright. They left the protection of their city and chased the alliance soldiers into the fields, and right into an ambush. They surrounded the Benjamites and began to slaughter them. They killed all of the Benjamite men, except for six hundred who ran away and hid. Then, they went from city to city, and killed every Benjamite woman and child. The six hundred men watch the smoke rise from their cities, like a burnt offering to a God who has turned his back on them.
After the battle is over, it dawns on some individual, “You know, we’ve just doomed the tribe of Benjamin to extinction. We’ve just killed all of their women and children, and we swore an oath that they can’t marry our daughters. Eventually those six hundred men will die, childless, and Benjamin will be no more. There will only be eleven tribes. I wonder how God feels about that? Maybe we should have thought this through.”
The tribal leaders gather in conference. “What are we going to do about this? Is there any city that didn’t answer our call to the alliance?” Someone says, “Yeah! Jabesh Gilead sat this one out. Nobody from there ever came to the war.” And so the tribal leaders decide, “Then Jabesh Gilead never took the daughter oath. Technically, we wouldn’t be breaking our oath if we gave the six hundred survivors their daughters.” That night the soldiers of the tribal alliance stormed their own village of Jabesh Gilead. They killed all of the men, all of the women, and all of the male children. They only spared the young virgin girls (Numbers 31:17). These four hundred girls were given to the Benjamite survivors as wives, so that their tribe would survive.
Of course, that left two hundred men without wives. “Now what do we do? Well, every year during feast time the young girls walk the road from Bethel to Shechem. If the two hundred men were hiding along the road, they would be able to kidnap two hundred girls. Technically, since they’re kidnapping them we are not actually giving our daughters to them.” And that is how the tribe of Benjamin survived extinction, and set Israel on the road to having a king instead of relying on God for their leadership.
All of this because a jerk of a Levite Priest didn’t want to wait one more night, and start his trip home the next morning.
I am not anti-war. I spent twelve years in the U. S. Air Force, and I adamantly believe there are some situations which can only be dealt with by the use of force. However, there are some aspects of war which continually disappoint me.
- How easy it is to let events escalate out of control. A trial would have solved this entire conflict. Sixty five thousand men, and their families, would never have died. How many young soldiers die, because no one will stand up and do the right thing until it is too late?
- The people responsible for starting the conflict rarely have to suffer the consequences of their actions. Neither the Levite, nor the Old man, nor the drunken mob are mentioned in association with the civil war they started. In fact, the text leads us to believe that they all sat-out the conflict and watched from the sidelines. Sometimes it makes me angry that the sons and daughters of Presidents, Senators, and Congressmen are shielded from conflict, while we pray for the safety of the young men and women from this very congregation who so selflessly serve to protect us.
- How easy it is to forget the faceless fallen. In this story there is far more compassion for the six hundred cowards of Benjamin, than for the forty thousand soldiers of the tribal alliance who died. What reason did they give to those soldiers mothers’ to explain why their sons would not return? I am convinced that America is a safer nation for attacking Iraq. There is no doubt in my mind that we were justified in pursuing force there. However, once the war was over we began an impossible police action, which has never worked for us in any previous employment. How do we explain to the parents that their children died because the Iraqi government didn’t want to sort out their own internal religious squabbles?
We are a blessed people, living in a blessed country. On this Memorial Day, please take a moment to remember the fallen men and women of our military – who gave their lives to secure our blessings.
Phyllis Trible, “Texts of Terror: Literary-Feminist Readings of Biblical Narratives”, Overtures to Biblical Theology 13 (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1984), 80-82.
Stuart Lasine, “Guest and Host in Judges 19: Lot’s Hospitality in an Inverted World”, Journal for the Study of the Old Testament 29 (June 1984), 37-59.
This is the first Phinehas is mentioned. His earlier absence may indicate either that he did not support the war, or that he was deliberately not consulted.
Barbara E. Organ, “Pursuing Phinehas: A Synchronic Reading”, The Catholic Biblical Quarterly 63:2 (April 2001), 203-218.
P. E. Satterthwaite, “Narrative Artistry in the Composition of Judges XX”, Vetus Testamentum 42:1 (January 1992), 80-89.